(716) The Age of Steel

Todays episode pretty much hits the ground running with the Doctor, Rose, Mickey, Ricky and the bloke from Blue Peter run into the getaway van. The scene that follows show that Pete Tyler has been feeding information to Ricky. Ricky’s death was somewhat inevitable and this means that Mickey has to step into his shoes which bearing in mind what he has done since his first appearance

Lumic goes from being in his chair to being the Cyber Controller. His reluctance is perhaps ironic. When the Cyber Controller appears the chair is something that doesn’t look dissimilar to the throne in Game of Thrones. It’s over the top and just looks a little bit naff. The design of the Controller is rather good because you can see its brain and also its eyes are lit up.

I found Mrs Moore to be quite nice in this episode and thought that she could easily have become a companion. Her death is one that I didn’t see coming and her best scene comes when she and the Doctor examine the Cyberman that the just killed. The Cyberman’s name is Sally and she was getting married which just made the horror of what was going on even worse. This slant of the character is something that had never really been examined before.

The way that the Cybermen are defeated is having their emotional inhibiters disabled and can see what they have become thus causing them to feel pain. It’s a great way of defeating the Cybermen because it forces them to deal with the thing that they can’t deal with. The Cyber Controller tries to catch the Doctor after he has climbed up a ladder on a zeppelin. Only in Doctor Who would you have a scene that involves a Cyber Controller and a Zeppelin.  

What makes the Cybermen’s plan seem plausible is because there are so many Cybermen on screen. The best thing about new Who is that there isn’t three Cybermen or three Daleks to invade somewhere. In this story there are hundreds of them and it really adds to the effect. The visual effects to realise the machines used to convert people is very good and again this adds to the effect of something truly horrible being created.

The performances from the regulars have been mixed. I haven’t found Billie Piper to be as annoying as she was in yesterdays episode but this selfish streak that there seems to be in the Rose character is something that has only now come to my attention or at least becoming something that has bothered me. David Tennant has run around these two episodes in his usual manner but his big scene with the Cyber Controller was arguably his strongest. Noel Clarke’s final scene is really good. He decides to stay because his Nan is alive and he thinks that he is more useful than he would be back home. He knows that he will never be able to compete with the Doctor for Rose’s affection. I think that Mickey would have been better served if this had been his last story because this scene was just right in terms of performance and dialogue.

These two episodes have shown that despite it being 21 years since he last directed a Doctor Who, Graeme Harper has lost any of his ability to direct a great story. The Cybermen’s return has been a good one with a story that has restore some of the shine to the Cybermen after some of the rust that has affected the steel monsters. This is one of the strongest Cybermen stories since Attack of the Cybermen and in the ratings I give these stories this comes out better than The Invasion with this two parter getting an average score of 7.78 and Invasion getting 7.74. In reality I would say that Invasion is slightly better but that average score is over eight episodes whereas Rise of the Cybermen and Age of Steel are just two episodes so its not fair to compare them. Now the Cybermen and Mickey are out of the way, the series can settle back down and go back to 1952.